Killer_Tofu's Favorite Techdirt Posts Of The Week

from the crispy-fried-favorites dept

This week's favorites post comes from Killer_Tofu whose name intrigues me, but I'm not sure I really want to know.

This week I have been given the honor of sharing my favorite posts with my fellow Techdirt readers. The TD gang thought it nice to allow me to do this... and they didn't even charge me! Talk about a lost opportunity because I would have paid about a whole... I don't know... five or so dollars to be able to get this posted. How could they possibly get any benefit from allowing me to do this? Its almost like I am stealing something because they didn't make me pay them. (I am just joking, as all of us regular readers know, it is a great way to include the community and to CwF.)

Okay, before I start with my favorite posts, I want to mention that a lot of my views are shaped by what I feel is best for the human population as a whole. What would help the most people. Being a techie and reading TD, one of the things I see holding a lot of us back is patents. For now, patents seem to get in the way of a lot of innovation and to be a non-stop drain of money from the system. All the money that should be put into innovating is shifted around from company to company with some always being siphoned off by lawyers. That is why I found it great to hear that both The Guardian and The Washington Post had rather great articles about how broken the patent system is today. A little bit of icing on the cake from the Washington Post article was that it was written by Steven Pearlstein, who we were told is read by those in Congress. Hopefully they listen. If those two weren't enough, to follow it up during the same week we had The Wall Street Journal also adding a great piece as to why patents are not all they are supposed to be.

Moving on from patents we had a fair few good lawsuit outcomes this week. We had a couple of good instances of bad lawsuits being dropped. There was one for The Expendables, where it was another case of "sue every IP address we can find on the internet." They ended up dropping the lawsuit entirely. And Poor Righthaven. About the only lawsuit that could be considered anywhere near good for them was dismissed due to a lack of standing. I do have to give them kudos for their persistence. Even if they went about... well, everything, the wrong way (including the idea behind their lawsuits). There was the absolutely wonderful and great to read article about a federal court defying the other federal courts, saying that law enforcement needs a warrant and probable cause to get your location data. I hope that another court or two will lean this way and then get the idea up to the Supreme Court and they will rule in favor of our 4th amendment (saying a warrant is indeed necessary). As if that ruling wasn't good enough (and really, we can never get enough good rulings) we have the MP3Tunes ruling that went the way of the greater good. Here EMI failed in their lawsuit and the DMCA safe harbors came through right where they should have. Reading through that article also presented us with the gem that the DMCA applies to pre-1972 recordings as well.

Another great topic I find uplifting is when large corporations get called on their lies. I will start off this section with yet another article on EMI. In this case, they were caught screwing an artist. I don't see how this could be considered anything other than lying, with as many times as their story changed. As if their mistakes weren't enough, they ended the conversation with Bill Nelson of Be-Bop Deluxe by telling him that he should feel lucky they will give him royalties from here on out. How insulting of them. Why would anyone believe the major labels or the RIAA have the artist's interests are heart at this point? Next we have AT&T's accidental disclosure that they lied about why they need T-Mobile. I was almost shocked to find that the FCC is actually going to question them about this. It almost feels kind of sad when one of the government areas does what you would think they should do for the people and you are pleasantly surprised.

For the last section I have some miscellaneous posts that I enjoyed. First off there was the individual giving away lemonade for free. The man in charge of the farmer's market going on around him threatened him, assaulted him (tried to take the camera right out of our protagonists hands) and finally called the cops on him. It almost feels like civil disobedience for standing up for giving away lemonade, except for the fact that it is perfectly legal (just as legal as his recording of all of the events). I am curious if the cops can get in trouble for arresting you for something they know is legal though (reference the cop saying "we won't arrest you today"). Next there was the news that the messengers were right about Fox delaying the release of its shows online. Sure as rain the copyright infringement rates went up for their shows the instant they delayed them. It is almost like the only ones who didn't see that coming were Fox themselves and the MPAA (who had the nasty slam article trying to shoot the messengers pointing out what would happen).

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Rates of piracy go up! Law enforcement make sad face.

One thing that is great about that news is that, it proves once again that people stop pirating not because they can't do it or laws are having any effect, but because they found something better and when they don't they just go back to their ol' pirate ways :)

One thing you can count every single time is that people will find ways around anything,

Apparently that has being going on since forever as it Terry Jones can attest to that in his wonderful documentary about the middle ages.

Quote:
Uploaded by gonobdotcom on Aug 22, 2011
Daily Caller - Capitol police arrested three people Saturday afternoon for selling lemonade on the West Lawn of the Capitol Building. They were participating in "Lemonade Freedom Day" — a national demonstration against a spate of recent lemonade stand shutdowns by police and health inspectors.

According to the D.C. group's Facebook event page, three lemonistas — Meg Mclain, K.n. Dill and Will Duffield — were taken into custody by Capitol Police. It is not known what the protesters were charged with. The Capitol Police did not return calls for information.

Quote:
A few young people sell lemon aid an are arrested! Git a grip on what's going on ! Or﻿ elected officials are selling our whole nation on that same property! Did they get a permit from the American people to do that??????

Is this part of the growing discontent that people feel with their government?

People know that something is wrong, they can feel it even if they can not say exactly what it is and apparently are starting to take matters into their own hands.

Its about control and bad thought out laws that end in crazy confrontations about little things that no one with a bit of common sense would think it is sane.

Maybe every law should be re-evaluated and have included in no uncertain terms the purposes and objectives of that law so the spirit of that law becomes clear and cannot be misinterpreted on purpose or otherwise.

People try to say that laws forbidding sales of food is to protect others, well protect from what when it is lemonade? Lemons are used for disinfecting hospitals of dangerous pathogens what could probably cause harm to sell lemonade?

Now if the law had that stated then one could not go after the stand since the police would have to prove that that food could possibly be hazardous and lemon is not a hazardous substance is it?

People could go to court and have a judge say in no uncertain terms that lemons don't pose a risk to public health and carrying that they could just say to any officer to just sod off.

Also making people state the purpose and objectives of the law make it harder for people with malice to sneak functional bad language that would affect other parts and be stealth about it, this are the laws, we need them and we need them to be clear or they are of no use because people lose their trust in that system and when that happens it will take a long time to get that trust back.

"Its almost like I am stealing something because they didn't make me pay them."

I spent 20 minutes trying to come up with something funny to say. Then realized that your line was the funniest thing ever. Sarcasm, humor, a knife in the ribs of the content industry ... to funny, and great post.

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And indeed, that is where the term originally popped into my mind. Between that and right about the time I decided to rebrand on this site (used a different moniker for the first year or two here) my family actually started to eat tofu. With both of those, I started using the term as my handle.

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I do not know whether to feel great that people are standing up more, or horrified that the police in DC arrested people for selling lemonade. The cops there in DC are starting to have a terrible record there between arresting those who sell lemonade and those who happen to dance to music only playing on their headphones.

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another biased article

The agents of banks, huge multinationals, and China are at it again trying to brain wash America.

"patent reform"

Just because they call it “reform” doesn’t mean it is.

The patent bill is nothing less than another monumental federal giveaway for banks, huge multinationals, and China and an off shoring job killing nightmare for America. Even the leading patent expert in China has stated the bill will help them steal our inventions. Who are the supporters of this bill working for??

Patent reform is a fraud on America. This bill will not do what they claim it will. What it will do is help large multinational corporations maintain their monopolies by robbing and killing their small entity and startup competitors (so it will do exactly what the large multinationals paid for) and with them the jobs they would have created. The bill will make it harder and more expensive for small firms to get and enforce their patents. Without patents we cant get funded. Yet small entities create the lion's share of new jobs. According to recent studies by the Kauffman Foundation and economists at the U.S. Census Bureau, “startups aren’t everything when it comes to job growth. They’re the only thing.” This bill is a wholesale slaughter of US jobs. Those wishing to help in the fight to defeat this bill should contact us as below.

Small entities and inventors have been given far too little voice on this bill when one considers that they rely far more heavily on the patent system than do large firms who can control their markets by their size alone. The smaller the firm, the more they rely on patents -especially startups and individual inventors.

Re: another biased article

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Next from Glenn Beck:

Pirates are “a blessing from God.”,

How many warnings do you think you’re going to get, and how many warnings do you deserve? This hurricane piracy that is coming thorough the East Coast, for anyone who’s in the East Coast and has been listening to me say ‘Food storage!’ ‘Be prepared!’

… If you’ve waited, this hurricane piracy is a blessing. It is a blessing. It is God reminding you — as was the earthquake last week — it’s God reminding you you’re not in control. Things can happen. Be prepared and be someone who can help others so when disaster strikes, God forbid, you’re not panicking.

Apple vs samsung

I still don't get the fuss. Apple's is a rectangle with rounded corners while Samsung's is a circle with the four cardinal points straightened out and stretched a bit. I thought it would be obvious to anyone...